V
THE SURVIVOR
LONELINESS, CREATION, AND
THE PROSPECT OF DEATH
THE LAST LOVE AFFAIR
SICKNESS, DEATH, AND SURVIVAL
(1921-1924)
Desire for solitude approaching loss of consciousness. Alone with myself.
After 1920 the “Metamorphosis” was accomplished. “I became someone else.” The man Kafka wasted away in order to facilitate the growth of the fabulous animal—the only creature capable of crossing over the “last terrestrial frontier” and recording what happens in the other world. Kafka did not decide to live with Milena, and his meeting with Dora Dymant—the last feminine mediation—came too late to accomplish the miracle of linking him to other men. It would seem that he abandoned himself, giving up his carnal husk in preparation for death. But he intended to die with his eyes open; he was less concerned with surviving through an operation in which he scarcely believed than with living again in another world to which he was drawing nearer each day. Life seemed clearly to continue, but “liberation” was approaching. In 1919 and 1920 the Diary, truly a Wild Ass’s Skin,1 is reduced to a few decisive lines. “The presentiment of a definitive liberation is by no means refuted by the fact that, the next day, captivity continues without change or worsens,” he writes, “or even by the explicit statement that captivity will never cease. All of this, on the contrary, may be a necessary precondition of definitive liberation” (January 9, 1920).
To win more freedom for himself, Kafka gave his notebooks to Milena. He no longer needed to keep the Diary: like Proust, he was “a memory come to life”—and this “accounts for my insomnia.” His health failed; he had known since the summer of 1917 that he had tuberculosis. “I have let my body decay. I wanted to avoid any distraction, to remain aloof from the lusty life of a healthy, useful man. As if despair and sickness were not at least as distracting!” When he goes for a walk he looks at people with mixed condescension and envy: they have trivial occupations which lead them nowhere, but they live and convey the illusion of being happy. Keeping his madness buried in his head “as in a shroud,” the solitary walker is certain to envy the happiness of the couples he meets, even though he realizes clearly “that in one of these happy unions he would despair.”
Systematically, year after year, Kafka had been destroying himself. The dike was about to break. What would happen? Now he knew: he would have to die to discover Canaan. Waiting for this last act, he was overcome by a feeling of absolute distress. Alive, he “does not come to the end of life”; where is the helping hand that could “dispel some of the despair brought on by his destiny”? At the beginning of 1920, during the course of his medical treatment at Merano, he hoped that this hand would be Milena Jesenská’s. But if he grasped it, he dared not cling to it, he capitulated in the face of his fear and plunged again into his loneliness, even as his love drew from him heart-rending cries.
… And I love you, foolishly, as the sea loves the fine gravel in its depths; my love is no less possessive.… But when I say that you are the one I love most, this is perhaps not love … love is the knife that I turn over in my wound.… Why speak to me, Milena, of a common future which will never be.… Few things are certain, but one is that we shall never live together, in the same house, elbow to elbow at the same table—never; not even in the same town.2
Condemned by the vagaries of his sickness and his relapses to wander from seaside resort to sanatorium, from the Tatra Mountains to Prague and from Spindelmühle to Müritz, in 1921 and 1922 he divided his time between the Czech capital and the mountains. “Collapse, impossibility of tolerating life or more exactly the course of life.” At the age of forty he would find time to rest for a moment: now he knew he would be unable to do so, for fear of the future cast a terrible cloud over the present. He was one of the uneasy Jews of the Western world who have never known a minute’s peace.
Nothing is given to me, I have to acquire everything, not only the present and the future but also the past, the thing every man receives gratuitously as his lot; that too I should acquire, and it is the hardest task; if the earth turns to the right—I do not know whether it does—I should turn to the left in order to recapture the past. But I have not the least power to satisfy these obligations, I cannot bear the world on my shoulders, which hardly endure the weight of my winter jacket.… It is sheer folly for anyone to try to pull through alone—folly paid with folly.3
Yet his “folly” was not without remission. In the summer of 1923 he was in Müritz on the Baltic, having gone there with his sister and nephews. There he discovered a holiday colony of the Berlin Jewish People’s Home; he took a lively interest in the work of this group—indeed, in everything having to do with Zionism. It was there also that he met Dora Dymant, a Polish Jew who had been brought up in the Hasidean tradition and had escaped from her strict patriarchal family, ruled by the intangible Law of Moses. Having gone first to Breslau and then to Berlin, she had two apparently contradictory passions: the theater and Hebrew. Franz, who had applied himself to the study of Hebrew, read aloud with her long passages from the Book of Isaiah. Soon a new love arose; the last rays of autumn came to brighten his life.
Kafka decided to try to acquaint himself at last with a normal life. He was ready to try with Dora the experiment in conjugal living that he had refused to undertake with Milena. That she consented is probably due to the fact that she was Jewish whereas Milena was not. “Without ancestors, without marriage, without descendants, with a violent desire for ancestors, marriage, descendants,” he tried to create a shelter for want of roots.
Undeterred by the objections of his family, he lived with Dora in the suburbs of Berlin, first in Steglitz, then in Zehlendorf. Was he to know at last “the happiness of married men, young and old” (“happiness which is beyond my reach and which, even if it were not, I would find unbearable … yet the only happiness on which I would like to sate myself”)? In any case, he seemed calmer, more relaxed, almost happy, and he had eluded his demons. “They search for me but do not find me, for the moment at least.” Max Brod writes, “I saw that Kafka was truly happy with his companion.” He even managed to sleep well, “an unheard-of novelty in these years.” Writing, which a few weeks earlier had called for superhuman efforts, again became simple if not effortless. He prepared for publication in short order “The Burrow,” “Josephine the Singer,” “Investigations of a Dog,” and turned over to the publisher the four short stories in A Hunger Artist (naturally it was Max Brod who found a publisher for him—the Schmiede publishing house).
It seemed that he had found salvation. For the first time in his life he had discovered that he could live with another person, enter into a conjugal relationship with the one he loved. This was an extraordinary revelation which would have filled him with pride if he had been capable of pride. But his demons returned, more wicked and more numerous. They made him pay for his unseasonable happiness. They were announced by a thousand signs: first the harsh winter of 1923, when the ravages of the cold were added to the ravages of inflation.
Ruined by defeat, humiliated by the occupation of the Ruhr, shaken by riots, the Weimar Republic staggered under the successive blows of communists and fascists. On November 9, 1923, following the red uprisings in Hamburg, Hitler tried but failed to bring off the Munich Putsch. But this was only a reprieve: ten years later, the flag tinged with Bauriedl’s blood—the Blutfahne—was to be venerated as a talisman.4 To be sure, by issuing new notes—Rentenmarks—Schacht the magician saved the German economy, as Erhard was to do twenty-five years later. But the middle classes were ruined. Kafka shared their plight: rent, food, his physician’s fees went up faster than his meager income, and his royalties were soon exhausted. Still, he distributed to those whose need was greater than his own the provisions sent to him by his family. The sanatorium, the clinic, and even the hospital were too expensive. One would have to “earn gold-marks in order to live here.”
For years he had been having a temperature in the evening. He finally came to accept his sickness and hoped that he could manage to live with it. Had he not already endured the chains of his job, the test of loneliness, and the anguish of creation? The sanatorium was too expensive, that was all; he must not even think about it any more. But Kafka’s family, alerted by Max Brod, became alarmed, and on March 17, 1924, his friend personally took him to Prague, where his parents opened their arms to him. The writer ceased to be “the Father’s equal” and became once again the delicate child that he had been for so long. This he felt as a defeat, as the failure of all his plans for achieving independence. “Protected and exhausted,” he did not even have the strength to run away.
Thereafter everything moved swiftly. Early in April he had to be taken to the sanatorium. But the results of the medical examinations were so bad that the Wiener Wald refused to assign him to a room: his larynx was already infected.
Transferred to the Vienna clinic of Professor Hajek, Kafka was unhappy: he received routine but impersonal treatment—he was treated as “the patient in room number so-and-so”—in spite of the interventions of Robert Klopstock and Franz Werfel. Finally he was taken to Kierling, near the Vienna Woods, where he had a room filled with flowers, and Dora to watch over him. But in May his lungs and his larynx were in such a state “that no specialist could help him any more, and the only thing one can do is to relieve pain by administering morphine or pantopon.”5
Kafka could no longer talk and communicated in writing with those around him. He decided to ask for Dora’s hand, but he did so, as always, without daring to believe that his request would be granted. In a very humble letter he explained to Dora’s father that he was not a “true believer” but a penitent who would require much time to become worthy of Dora. As soon as he received this strange letter, the old man consulted one of his friends who was a rabbi—“the miracle-working rabbi”—and was dissuaded from accepting the patient for a son-in-law.
Kafka was dumbfounded. He had done his best to link himself to the human world, to seize the hand held out to him; it was not his fault that this hand was abandoning him at the most difficult stage. Today was not the beginning of his being tired of life. “This pitcher was already broken long before going for water.” “Nothing here is either my fault or the fault of men. I belong to profound silence; that is the climate which suits me.”6
Henceforth everything fitted into the pattern of the last stage. The “final period” arrived—the period of “terrible moments,” “impossible to enumerate, almost uninterrupted.” “Walks, nights, days, incapable of everything except suffering.”7 Each evening an owl, the sign of death, appeared at the window of the dying man—whether in dream or in reality is of little consequence.
A brilliant month of May fell upon the sanatorium in which an ultrabrilliant mind continued to function inside a tattered body. “The only way of consoling oneself would be to say: that will happen, whether you wish it or not. And what you wish provides only imperceptible support. More than a consolation would be: you too have weapons.”8 There were the last dated lines, written a year earlier in his Diary. Kafka no longer entertained doubts: he was approaching an end which would be the beginning of everything. Before entering into the Holy of Holies he had to divest himself of his shoes, his luggage, all of his clothing; lay bare his nudity and “everything hidden under nudity”; abdicate his intelligence and everything that can rob us of “the inextinguishable fire” of conscience. Only this fire would be worthy of making contact with the Holy of Holies. Kafka wondered also what punishment awaited him. Doubtless the father’s contempt, the impossibility of marrying, the failure of his health had already sanctioned his original failure; but these were only the signs or premonitory symptoms of definitive punishment. Had Kafka been expelled from Paradise, had Paradise been destroyed, or—and this would be “the most terrible” punishment—would Paradise always remain inaccessible to him, “leaving the rest of things unchanged”?
On Monday, June 2, he wrote a long letter to his parents, trying to dissuade them from coming to Kierling. He was getting along better, though not well enough to receive them, for he would hardly be able to talk to them. “The truth is that the proprietor of the sanatorium is a sick old man who cannot be bothered with my case very much, and my relations with the very unwelcome assistant doctor are more on friendly than on medical terms.” Thus he took pains jokingly to reassure his family. But during the night he had difficulty in breathing, asked for morphine and, when the doctor hesitated, said to him, “Kill me, or you are a murderer!” A short time later he tore off his icepack and threw it on the floor (“Why torture me any more?”). When Dr. Klopstock, moving away from him for a moment, reassured him, “But I am not leaving you,” Kafka quickly retorted, “But I am leaving you.” A few moments later, he died.
Thus the dark, regal humor which had saved him so many times did not desert him in the presence of death. The “Kafkan” interjections inspired by this supreme moment recall Descartes’ famous admonition to a Swede named Diafoirus when the latter tried to bleed the dying philosopher: “Gentlemen, don’t waste French blood!”
All of his friends were deeply aware of their loss. Prostrate, Dora Dymant kept repeating his name for hours. Klopstock, who was later to become one of the leading lung specialists, contemplated this regal face “from the oldest and noblest stock” and wrote: “The gentleness of his human existence has gone; only his matchless spirit still shows through the rigid features of his face, which has the beauty of an ancient marble bust.” What had already been said of Proust some eighteen months earlier might well have been said of him: “This is not the end for Pascal.” His family buried him in the Jewish cemetery of Prague on a misty, dismal morning. There was a crowd around his parents, his sisters, and Dora Dymant, who collapsed on his grave. Did Dora then recall Kafka’s words, “The cruel part of death is that it brings the intense suffering associated with the end, but not the end”?9
“I must confess that one day I envied someone very much,” he had written to Milena. “He was loved, well protected by strength and by reason, and laid to rest under flowers. I am always quick to envy.” This was now his fate. It was also to Milena that he had explained that a work begins to live only after the death of the author.
… living writers maintain a vital interest in their works. They fight for or against, solely because they are there. The true, independent life of a book begins only at their death, or more exactly, some time after their death. But then the book is alone and can rely solely on the strength of its own vitality.10
When we read these lines, we are reminded of many writers who died before their works, like Kafka’s, actually took flight: Descartes, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Marcel Proust. There is an obvious parallelism between the life and experience of Proust and of Kafka: both were Jewish or half-Jewish, both were bachelors, both were obsessed by a creative project to which they sacrificed their lives, both were inclined to see underneath the appearances of reality something besides the ordinary world which satisfies the rest of us.
It was Proust who wrote these lines which might be from the pen of Kafka: “Happiness is salutary for the body but sorrow develops the strength of the mind … is indispensable in reminding us always of the truth and forcing us to take things seriously.… It is true that this truth, which is not compatible with happiness or health, is not always compatible with life.”11 But it was Kafka who wrote the following lines, which could be from the pen of Proust:
… One who is alive and does not succeed in life has need of a helping hand to mitigate somewhat the despair brought on him by his destiny—he is only partially successful in this respect—but on the other hand, he can write what he sees under the rubbish, for he sees more than others and sees things in a different light. Is he not dead even as he lives? Is he not the authentic survivor?
Three misfortunes produced in an indolent Marcel Proust the exclusive concentration on literary creation which a happy life would have denied him: his asthma isolated him, his parents died, and uranism finally locked him in a mental prison from which he emerged only to “revictual” his work. The paternal curse, the impossibility of marrying, and sickness played an identical role with Kafka. But the lonely hermit of Prague carried humility, renunciation, detachment further than the recluse of the Boulevard Haussmann. During his last days, of course, Proust—who was stripped of his “enjoyment of the universe,” deprived “of movement, of speech and of the simple comfort of not suffering,” “evicted as it were from himself,” and who no longer left his room but took refuge in his work, exclusively preoccupied with giving it “the unreservedness which was denied him”—bears a striking resemblance to Kafka. But “he still exhibited vanity, an awareness of social levels, and a passion for producing work which would be his revenge on life.” Nothing like this in Kafka. In the case of Proust, the man of letters killed the man; Kafka was a prophet, a vates in the old Latin sense, who was concerned neither with his own fate nor with the fate of his creations. For example, his friends had to force him to surrender his manuscripts for publication. In his will Kafka gave Max Brod the responsibility of destroying his unpublished manuscripts, and he himself burned more than one notebook.
To be sure, Kafka does not deny that literature is his sole vocation. Twenty texts bear witness to this certainty. Writing gives meaning to his “monotonous, empty, misdirected” life. It is “the only road that can lead to progress.” A vast world seethes inside his head. “Better to burst a thousand times than to push it back inside myself or bury it; for that is why I am here; on this subject I have not the least doubt.” Literary creation even confers upon him a certain invulnerability. When he writes, he feels “bold, naked, powerful, extraordinary.” But he is never sure of the result. His state of mind is that of a mountain climber lost on a high peak: he knows that he will be saved if he reaches shelter before nightfall; he sets out courageously, but something tells him that he will never arrive in time. No matter what, he is condemned: condemned if he stays where he is, he is not saved because he advances. Nor must he become impatient: impatience and negligence issue from the same sin against Spirit. One would have to believe without needing hope, and this is manifestly impossible.
Twenty times Kafka—like Proust—undertook to “change his way of living” in order to devote himself exclusively to the life of the spirit, to the exploration of the other world.
But it is impossible to calculate how much strength I have for this undertaking. It may already have vanished forever; it may come back to me once again, even though the circumstances under which I live are not favorable to it. So I vacillate, fly incessantly to the peak of the mountain, but cannot rest on the height even for a moment. Others also falter, but they are in lower regions and have more strength. Faced with the threat of falling, they are caught on the wing by a close relative who walks beside them and is there for this purpose. But I falter on the heights, not, unfortunately, because of death but because of the eternal torments of death.12
In order to climb to “the peak of the mountain” Kafka was willing to cut the bonds that still linked him to men “in lower regions”—occupation, family, country, church—and to assume responsibility for his singularity. Fortunately—or unfortunately—he was a Jew, and “a Jew is nowhere a stranger and nowhere fully assimilated.” Everything around Kafka seemed to anticipate death: Czechoslovakia in 1924, like Austria-Hungary in 1914, was but a fragile conglomeration of heterogeneous nationalities coveted by a Germany which would soon fall prey to Hitlerism. Kafka too was suspect: suspect as a Jew in the eyes of the Czechs and Germans around him, suspect as a German and a Czech among the Jews. But he was a German only by virtue of his language. “Thus his fate as a writer is inscribed, like his life, under the sign of the impossible: impossibility of not writing, impossibility of writing in German, impossibility of writing in another language. To these he would have liked to add a fourth impossibility: the impossibility of writing.”13 The result was this disquieting consequence: literature was for him only the temporary state of someone who writes his testament “Just before hanging himself”; but this temporary state “may well last a lifetime.”
Caught between these two fires—the impossibility of writing and the even greater impossibility of not writing—Kafka accepted his impossible vocation. He plunged to the bottom of the abyss. Wandering like a sleepwalker in an infrahuman universe, he found the answer to the question of his original anguish. He knew that he had destroyed any semblance of human equilibrium within himself. What counted was no longer this life but the other life. “He gives the appearance of working to feed and clothe himself … but each visible mouthful is matched by an invisible mouthful, each visible garment by an invisible garment.” Each sunny morning reminds him that he has no future except his death. He does not fear it, for it is but an apparent end. “Everything happens as if interaction between the universal and the particular occurs on the real stage while life in the universal is inscribed only on the backcloth.” Death is only a door to pass through, the end of a terrestrial fever.
For a long time he had believed—still like Proust—that his creation would be his salvation. He soon had to admit that it was also a terrible ordeal. Still, he continued to write “in spite of everything, at any price.” It was no longer a question of salvation but of survival—not of preserving life but of avoiding its complete loss.
He no longer had any doubts. His quest was to culminate in madness. Since the night of December 22, 1912, when he wrote “The Judgment,” he had transcended “the last terrestrial frontier.” Committed to a route “which deviates from the human route,” sealed alive inside his own literary creation, “incapable of everything except suffering” and “extracting words from the void,” fleeing from his equals not in order to live in peace but in order to die in peace, “banished from down there, rejected here, overwhelmed at the dividing line,” Orpheus descended to the underworld and would not return to the surface.
To find the matchless pearl he paid the price from which all others recoiled: he paid it not only with his happiness but with the integrity of his spirit. The cries that echo through the last pages of the Diary are not only the cries of a drowned man “pounded for millenniums under oceanic pressures”; they are also the cries of a man who cannot find consolation for his failure and who still gropes for the Promised Land. Yet he himself had given the answer: “It is not because his life was too short that Moses failed to reach Canaan but because his was a human life.”
Kafka’s words, like his writings, are striking in their originality, in their “congenital indifference to customary ideas.”14 They are free of platitudes and, to an even greater degree, banality. The inimitable logic of his thought resembles the unfolding of “a strictly individual narrative in which the different moments are obscure events which have never before been reproduced and will never again be reproduced.”15
Even in the case of current events, his reflections reveal profound insights. As early as 1920, for example, he had not only had a presentiment of the direction which anti-Semitism was to take but had understood it perfectly. “Jews and Germans,” he told his friend Gustav Janouch, “are outsiders.” Is it because of their qualities that they are hated? No. “The reason for this hatred goes even deeper. In the final analysis, it is religious. This is easily discernible in the case of Jews but less so in the case of Germans, for their temple has not yet been destroyed. But that will come.”
In the same way, and even though he claimed that he understood nothing about politics, Kafka had divined the religious tendency of the Russian revolution (“But Bolshevism attacks religion! It does this because it is itself a religion”). He had glimpsed, in the turmoil of the twenties, “The beginnings of a terrible religious war.” As he was passing a procession of workers, marching with flags unfurled, he murmured:
They are masters of the street and think that they are masters of the world. And yet they are wrong. Behind them come secretaries, bureaucrats, professional politicians—all of the modern sultans whose accession to power they are facilitating. The revolution subsides, leaving only the slime of a new bureaucracy. The chains of tortured humanity are forged from administrative papers.16
Had the lonely Prague hermit divined Stalinism even before the death of Lenin?
Such is the absurd genius—in contrast to the solar genius of a Goethe or Hugo—of Kafka: he sees further than humanity but does not see his feet. His intelligence illuminates history but he is incapable of applying it to the conduct of his life. Kafka knows but one definite thing, “and that is suffering.” He does not recoil in its presence, for “the writer’s mission is to guide that which is accidental into that which is isolated and mortal to the infinite life, to transform that which conforms to the law.”
Nietzsche dreamed of an art of apotheosis—“the nimbus and the dithyramb”—which would express our gratitude for a world finally worthy of man, a world glimpsed by Homer and Rubens. “To disparage, slander, vilify is Jewish and Christian!” he kept repeating. He would have seen in Kafka’s work an inadmissible bill of indictment in which the author fused in an indefinite confession, regret for a lost Paradise, the humiliation of being excluded from it, and the impossibility of ever being a part of it. Nietzsche dreamed of setting above common humanity a monstrous and superior animal, inhuman and superhuman; his promethean dream culminated in madness. Kafka asked only for the humble joys of common humanity, but in the end he also manifested a singularity that bordered on madness. But he at least chose it whereas the author of Zarathustra experienced it. None of the motives that incited other young men of his time to write—desire for glory and wealth, investigation of an influence or power—seems to have had the slightest effect on Kafka. He was interested only in essentials, in the fundamental dialectic of a human being in search of justification—innocent and guilty, uncertain of his origins and his future, incapable of founding his existence upon justice and truth.
He anticipated the death of “literature,” the triumph of abstract writing, the ejection of the real from a work of art which should no longer be anything except an interrogation of “the ultimate things.” Today many voices, beginning with Beckett’s, seem to be echoes of his voice (“I have nothing to do, that is, nothing in particular. I have to talk, that is certain. I have to talk, having nothing to say.… Not knowing how to talk, not wishing to talk, I have to talk”).17 With Kafka the writer begins to descend from the regions ruled by power and glory (the regions inhabited by Voltaire, Goethe, Hugo, Barrès) to those in which he is besieged by uncertainty, anguish, and humiliation. If he hardly dares to raise his voice, the reason is that he no longer is absolutely certain that he is alive.
NOTES
1. Balzac’s Wild Ass’s Skin (La Peau de chagrin, 1831), a fantastic tale inspired by Hoffmann, abounds in recollections of wretched times and symbolizes a constant theme: the dissipation of vital energy through the satisfaction of desires. [Trans.]
2. Letters to Milena.
3. Ibid.
4. Andreas Bauriedl (1879-1923) was one of the sixteen Nazis killed at Munich on November 9, 1923. [Trans.]
5. Max Brod.
6. Diary.
7. Diary.
8. Diary.
9. Préparatifs de noce à la campagne.
10. Letters to Milena.
11. “La Prisonnière,” in A la recherche du Temps Perdu.
12. Diary.
13. Marthe Robert, preface to the French translation of Kafka’s Diary (Paris: Grasset, 1954).
14. Maurice Blanchot, La part du feu.
15. Ibid.
16. Quoted by Gustav Janouch, Kafka m’a dit (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1952).
17. L’Innommable.